Conservative blogs pile on Krugman

Paul Krugman’s liberal defenders in the blogosphere found themselves outgunned on Tuesday by a swarm of critics on the right - and even some of those on the left questioned the timing of The New York Times columnist’s Sept. 11 post on the anniversary of the attacks.

Krugman, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, touched off an uproar when he wrote on Sunday, “The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”

Liberal bloggers defending the columnist appeared outnumbered on the issue by their conservative counterparts. Some left-leaning writers backed Krugman even as they questioned the timing, while the support from others was muted.

“I probably wouldn’t have used Krugman’s formulation that leading Republicans rushed to ‘cash in on the horror.’ Making the charge on the 10th anniversary itself seems deliberately provocative, or at least deliberately designed to provoke debate,” wrote the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, before arguing that it was not very controversial to say that conservatives used the focus on terrorism post-9/11 to “gain political advantage.”

The normally liberal Village Voice declined to rush to Krugman’s defense. “Odd; it reads like an angst-riddled teenager’s Facebook status update,” wrote Voice blogger Nick Greene.

A blogger at the liberal Crooks and Liars hedged as well, defending Krugman only after putting “questions about the appropriateness of the timing aside.”

“To date, we’ve lost 4,752 allied service members in Iraq and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. How is this not a black mark of shame on the legacy of 9/11? How can we praise the first responders’ bravery on one hand and then deny them assistance for the mesothelioma they contracted despite Bush administration assurances that the air was safe to breathe?” said Nicole Belle at the Crooks and Liars blog.

This is not to say, however, that some didn’t have Krugman’s back.

“Is anyone proud, 10 years later, that we’re still losing lives in Afghanistan? Is anyone proud, 10 years later, of the war launched under false pretenses that killed several hundred thousand innocent Iraqis and killed or wounded 40,000 Americans?” wrote the blogger at FireDogLake in a post titled, “ Krugman is Right”.

Meanwhile, conservative bloggers reacted angrily to Krugman’s piece.

“Koward Krugman’s problem is that he’s a lazy intellectual slob who hurriedly hits the ‘publish’ button before the sand in his little kitchen egg timer empties… Shame on him. Shame on the New York Times,” said conservative blogger Michelle Malkin.

But conservative blog Instapundit urged conservatives to cool it. “Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately… he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied,” wrote blogger Glenn Reynolds.

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein didn’t react until the day after the blog posting, preferring instead to wait until after his commemoration of 9/11 had passed. “I cannot imagine what it must be like to be so consumed with disgust for opposing political figures that it somehow “irrevocably poisoned” your ability to memorialize those who lost their lives in a horrific tragedy,” wrote Klein on Monday.